I'll copy David's response from the other topic since it's just as applicable.
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The main problem with the proposals to take out the Temple is that you can't "erode" the armor. The amount of kinetic energy required to do appreciable damage to the armorplast protecting it is a . . . nontrivial number. Even assuming that Merlin possessed sufficient space going capability to loft the number of penetrators you seem to be proposing, he'd have to be able to guarantee hitting exactly the same spot repeatedly to "chip away" at the armor, and each impact — assuming he was going to be able to get through at all — would be the equivalent of a ground burst kiloton-range explosion. The consequences of that for the citizens of Zion would be significant and result in very high civilian death tolls, unless it was possible for her to somehow warn the citizens of the city to evacuate.
Further, however, you need to look at Nimue's description of the Temple from
Off Armageddon Reef Reef.
nimue alban on page 68 wrote:
It was ridiculous. She'd seen planetary-defense command bunkers which had been flimsier than the Temple, and she wondered which brilliant lunatic had decided to plate that silver dome in armorplast? It looked as if the plating was at least seven or eight centimeters thick, which meant it would have been sufficient to stop an old, pre-space forty-centimeter armor-piercing shell without a scratch. It seemed just a little excessive as a way to keep the dome and that ludicrous statue of Langhorne bright and shiny.
She isn't saying that the
armorplast is what makes it less flimsy than "planetary-defense command bunkers" which she'd seen. Planetary defense bunkers are designed to sneer at mere 16" (well, 15.8") armor-piercing shells. They are designed to stand up to
high megaton-range bunker busters. The Temple
as a whole is built to that standard of toughness; the armorplast coating of the dome (as Nimue's own reflection make clear, I thought) is to permanently and miraculously preserve the brilliant polish of the Temple's dome and Langhorne's statute. Even assuming that she could take down the dome without totally flattening Zion (which, to be fair, she probably could do, although she'd still inflict significant collateral damage), all she'd manage to do would be to piss off whatever might be hiding
under the dome in the basement of that "planetary-defense command bunker" she's talking about.
Now, even if all she needed to do was to knock down the dome, and even if she was able to accomplish that with "only" the equivalent of a Hiroshima or Nagasaki-level explosion at an altitude of less than 200 feet, she would kill a whole big bunch of Zionites. If you'll go back and look at her reflections on this very matter, she knows that she could take out the aboveground portions of the Temple anytime she wanted to, although it might require a suicide run on someone's part to get the nuke onto the Temple's grounds. Unfortunately, unless she could get her device into the Temple/bunker's
basement, she couldn't take out the entire facility. And even if she managed that, she and the "good guys" would have to explain to the survivors why they detonated a megaton-range device in the middle of the largest city on Safehold. The death toll would be horrendous, and the initial assumption of virtually all Safeholdians would be that Shan-wei had finally managed to escape hell and destroy the Temple. Surely only the Queen of Hell would be willing to murder tens of thousands of people to destroy the structure! So when Charis announced that it had destroyed the Temple — "We had to destroy the village to save it" — who do you think the Temple Loyalists would decide Charis had been serving all along?
And, of course, there's also the question of what the bombardment system would do. Best case scenario, it would do
nothing . . . which would mean that Merlin and his friends would
still have no way of knowing what its on board instructions might be.
Worst-case scenario, it would take the explosion of a nuclear device on the planetary surface as an indication that someone had managed to build a very high level of technological capability without its sensors detecting them, in which case its instruction hierarchy might call for the systematic destruction of every major population center in order to get whoever had so thoroughly violated the Proscriptions. There are all sorts of other Really Bad possible outcomes between those two extremes, and Merlin and the inner circle
have absolutely no way to guess
which Really Bad Thing might happen.
You have to remember that the Temple
may be the central command and control node for the bombardment system. It may
not be, however, and even if it is, the system could well contain a Doomsday Protocol or some sort of deadman's switch.
In short, there is no way — from either the bloodbath quotient perspective or the "we don't know what would happen" perspective — that Merlin/Nimue would even
contemplate some sort of frontal assault on/bombardment of the Temple unless there was literally no other conceivable alternative.
cralkhi wrote:evilauthor wrote:*Looks at the OBS and defense it depth satellites surrounding it that Merlin's assets can't penetrate.*
Yeah... I wouldn't bet on that.
The proposition was Charis invading the Temple to shut down the OBS. If that was achieved, then Merlin could deal with anything that "woke up" due to that action, since there doesn't seem to be room under the Temple for a Nimue's-Cave-scale cache.
Merlin has enough modern weapons in there to arm a significant force, and there probably isn't room for big tanks or things to operate inside the Temple.
If it came to a siege of the Temple with Merlin outside, yes, the Temple's armor might be strong enough to be indestructible without lots of collateral damage to the city. OTOH, in such a situation Merlin could probably do enough flashy stuff to scare the people out of Zion before dropping kinetic weapons on the Temple, at least avoiding much loss of life.
Assuming the Temple doesn't have hidden AA stations that'll blow him out of the sky.
I'm pretty sure he would have seen those in his scans in OAR - he found power sources under the Temple that he couldn't identify, yes, but I think antiaircraft weapons would have been rather detectable.
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